from here to {kingdom} come :: colt

run, run, run away, buy yourself another day
a cold wind's whispering secrets in your ear
so low only you can hear
run, run, run and hide
somewhere no one else can find

"Kae?" I don't know why I even expect him to answer me. Kaelen's been a unique sort of gone for this past month or so, a puppet-limbed echo of himself held up by invisible strings of caffeine and nicotine and his own incorrigible stubbornness. The selfish part of me seethes, wants to shout at him that he's not the only one here who's lost someone, but I bite my tongue the way I always do, accepting but never content with living in the space of the precipice of rage. We've both lost more than most people ever will in their lives. I've lost two sisters to the grave, two more to the streets of the District, myself to the burning prison of my own anger. Kaelen's lost his mother, his protégée, and his assumed divinity. When Colt left, it was a tipping point for both of us.

I lost my best friend. Kae lost the love of his life. I'm handling it. He's not.

The silence of our patrol sits heavily across my shoulders, the familial resemblance of our bodies like tall, lanky spindle-towers throwing distorted shadows across the uneven pavement. Every so often a streetlight throws the face of a man I once called brother into sharp relief, the ravages of the other side's mercilessness still managing to shock me every time I look without being prepared for it. My memories of Kae's face are always of an even, impassive deadpan. Clever eyes, balanced features, smooth skin. Uniform. Flawless. Perfect. The wreck left behind in the wake of Pyrite Shore's cruel blades and misplaced rage is something I will never be able to associate with Kaelen, simply because it's too far from perfect. The deepest parts of the cut have only just healed over, lending to the angry red hue of the scar that stretches from forehead to jawline along the cruelest sort of path (thank Ripred he'd had his eyes closed when she cut him or he'd have lost his right eye), the healing tissue pulling the corner of his mouth downwards into a permanent scowl. Or maybe that's just his expression all the time, now. It's hard to tell.

"Earth to Kaelen. Snap out of it, please."

He starts a bit at that, jumping back defensively in response to my hand waving experimentally in front of his face. I immediately feel bad for my lapse of judgement. I can remember years of myself flinching away from all the terrors brought back in the form of a single touch, and the last thing Kae needs right now is that sort of trauma. He blinks slowly, as if I've just woken him from a deep sleep even though we've been walking the streets for over an hour. This is what losing Colt reduces him to. Sleepless nights and days lived like one of the walking dead, a bone-deep sense of hopelessness that radiates from his skin and the increasingly frequent smell of hypocrisy, whiskey clinging to his breath that he doesn't even bother trying to hide anymore.

(And a death wish that could spell the end for us all. Despite his excuses, I know that he never meant to come back from the Shore house alive. I saw the crippling disappointment in his eyes after the bandages came off and he saw that he was still stuck in a world of scars and broken hearts.)

"What, did you see something?" Kae mutters carefully, favoring the left side of his mouth since talking normally still hurts him. I miss the sharpness in his eyes, the way the old Kaelen would have been coiled like a jungle cat ready to pounce at the mere suggestion of a threat. Now he simply stands there, eyes glazed and fingers absently twirling the hilt of a throwing knife at a slow, languid pace.

"No, I just…" I just worry about you. I just think that Ella's a heartless bitch for still making you do patrols when you're hurt like this, inside and out. I just believe you're a danger to yourself and others when you're this out of it. I just want to tell you how sorry I am; I know that losing him hurt me and I can't even begin to fathom what it's done to you. I just, I just, I just… never know what to say or how to say it. "Sorry. It's nothing."

And then out of the shadows, they come.

From behind dumpsters, off of the roofs, seemingly from the air itself. One, then three, then five, and then I lose count because fucking Eris Moreno is trying to slit my throat and I'm too busy trying to deflect her attacks in a blind panic. It's a swarm; for every attack I deflect or dodge there are two more that at least somewhat find their mark, tiny gashes opening along my limbs and staining the faded gray of my hand-me-down jacket a violent red.

"Kaelen?!" The Dempsey essence at the core of me hates how frightened I sound, how dependent. But I am. I am a scared little girl who needs her big brother, and he is so far from my reach in every single way that there is nothing he can do to save me. Through the chaos I catch a glimpse of him, barely holding his own against Eris and some Shore boy while I fight my own war only a few feet away. He's too out of it to give me the backup I need, still reeling from his pain medication and whatever he thought I didn't see him slipping into his coffee a few hours ago. When I was a little girl, I operated under the fantasy that Kae would always be there to protect Kiera and I from the evils of the world he told us about in his icy divinity. Now Kiera's dead and Kaelen might as well be. I am alone, and the prospect is so much more terrifying than I thought it could be.

That sense of abandonment settles like a stone in my chest as I kick the knees out from under one of my assailants, backed up against the grimy brick wall before I have time to notice the mistake. Even though one falls under the sweeping arc of the switchblade gripped tightly in my hand, another falls in to take their place, all maliciously glimmering eyes and a smile that looks familiar but wrong, like a funhouse-mirror reflection of a ghost that I knew once.

"Nighty-night, Dempsey," Beretta Scarborough snarls, a split-second before she shoves a dagger between my ribs and twists.

I think I scream. It's hard to tell because the world takes on an odd, muffled quality in the wake of the pain. Agony roars through me, hitching up my spine and tensing in my throat and exploding sticky-red over my lips when I let out a weak little cough, fingers scrabbling ineffectually at Beretta's hand before she yanks the knife out and my vision fades out into shades of white. I can actually feel my lung collapse, and it's the most bizarre thing I've ever experienced. So this is it, I think as the pavement cracks unmercifully at my knees and I slump to the ground without any sort of grace. Anything I can see is blurry, everything distant other than the pain and the magnified drumbeat of my heart in my ears, the rasping gurgle of blood sticking to my throat as I try to breathe. I am going to drown in my own blood. This is how I die. Kiera sings sweetly from the edge of Oblivion, calling me to join her, but somewhere a little closer than that Kae is yelling, pulling my limp form into his lap in an exquisite twist of pain and holding my face firmly between delicate, scarred palms. I don't have it in me to shudder at the touch.

"Rora." He never calls me that. Only Colt calls me that. I wonder when he picked it up. His hands are warm. His voice sounds so far away, like he's at the bottom of a well. He sounds frightened. So very, very frightened. "Aurora, no, stay with me. Don't fall asleep, I can't lose you, not you too. Oh god, Rora, please."

"C-can't… breathe," I wheeze, hacking up another waterfall of red all over the front of Kaelen's shirt. If I don't drown in all the blood first, it'll be exsanguination that gets me. Everything is fuzzy, my vision tunneling at the edges and my limbs growing cold as I clutch weakly at his hand. "Kae… Kae, I'm scared."

"I know, I know you're scared. I'm scared too, but I need you to stay with me, okay?" Another spike of pain, and he's got a bundle of some sort of cloth in his hand, trying to put enough pressure on the wound to stop the bleeding. It comes away red in seconds.

"So… cold."

"Aurora Evelyn Dempsey, god dammit, you stay awake, do you hear me?!"

I think I try. I know I try. But Kiera's lullaby is so sweet, and my veins are full of lead and everything hurts until it doesn't anymore. And I can't feel the pain, can't feel the warmth of Kaelen's hand, can't feel anything. "I'm sorry, Kae."

And all is black.

Unconsciousness is such an odd thing. Sometimes there are strange periods of disassociation, a nearly out-of-body experience that feels like you're floating just inside your own skin, trapped beneath the surface in a stilted sort of awareness. The pain has stopped, and I can't feel or move or think, but that doesn't stop me from knowing that I'm being carried, from hearing the muddle of voices that crash around me like a wave, only a few of them distinct.

I shouldn't be helping you.

Riley, please.

I'll get her to the hospital. I can't… no promises. Lost a lot of blood.

Female, sixteen years old, stab wound to the right lung resulting in massive hemothorax…

Surgery…

Oh god, my baby girl, oh my god…

Going to have to do an emergency tube thoracostomy…

Get her prepped, Annette. I want that anesthesia done in two minutes.

Dr. Lightwood, her blood pressure's bottoming…

When I wake up, it's to a haze of sunshine and painkillers, a smiling nurse telling me that I had a little accident and had to go in for emergency surgery, that my body's been in a medically-induced coma for a week to allow me to heal and I'm going to be in the hospital for a while. I blink blearily at her and fall back asleep.

The sun is gone along with the chipper nurse when I claw my way back to consciousness again, my fingers brushing along the sterile sheets as I try to make sense of it all. I should be dead. I am not dead. I have been in the hospital for a week or more, depending on how long I slept. It is night time. I should be dead. I am not dead.

A shape moves in the doorway, and across the darkness I can see gleaming eyes, dark-dark brown and alive with the night. My first thought is that it's Beretta, come back to finish what she started, and I shuffle backwards in my bed only to be racked with a vague, drug-dulled pain from the tube sticking out of my right side. If she's come to kill me, it'll be a pretty easy job.

But then the form trips over a side table, crashing to the floor, and I can't help but smile. Maybe in the end, people with the last name Dempsey don't have to lose everything. Just maybe.

"I heard you'd jumped the fence, Hanlon."

fly high across the sky from here to kingdom come
fall back down to where you're from
don't you fret, my dear, it'll all be over soon
i'll be waiting here for you, for you, for you
don't you fret, my dear